In making carpet, particularly patterned Axminster carpet, a yarn tuft forming unit is used to provide yarn of a particular colour to each weaving point of the carpet. In conventional Axminster weaving there are two principal ways which the yarn tuft formation is carried out. The first way is on a Jacquard Axminster loom, and the second is on a spool Axminster loom.
On a gripper Jacquard Axminster loom each weaving point includes a yarn carrier which is normally fed by eight yarns usually of different colour and the Jacquard mechanism moves the carrier to bring a selected yarn to the yarn selection position. A gripper moves towards the carrier, grips the yarn at the yarn selection position then relative movement apart of the gripper and the carrier pulls a predetermined length of yarn from the carrier. The yarn is then cut to form a tuft and moved by the gripper to the weaving point. The tuft carried by the gripper is of the appropriate colour for the tuft to be supplied to the next row of carpet to be woven. For a conventional 12 foot (4 m) loom there are over a 1000 weaving points across the loom and thus the creel supplying yarn to the loom has to have the potential of carrying over 8000 yarn packages. Typically, when the creel includes measured quantities of yarn in each yarn package, an allowance of an additional eighteen meters of yarn is provided in each yarn package. Accordingly the greater the number of yarn packages the greater the wastage. A creel of such size occupies a substantial area and such a loom takes a considerable time to “thread up” as over 8000 yarn ends have to be fed through the creel and to the individual yarn carriers. In spite of such a large creel size a designer of such carpets is relatively limited since the number of colours available for each column of tufts extending in the warp direction of the finished carpet and corresponding to a single weaving point is limited to only eight throughout each pattern repeat. Jacquards are also known in which the yarn carrier can hold sixteen different yarns. These require an even larger creel which takes even longer to thread up.
Spool Axminster looms provide a designer with greater flexibility. In spool Axminster looms a separate spool is provided for each row of the pattern repeat and each spool has a separate yarn winding for each weaving point along each row. Therefore, at least theoretically, the designer has an infinite number of colour choices for each column and row of each pattern repeat. However, in practice, as the number of colour choices used for each column and row of the design increases, the number of yarn packages needed for the spool winding operation also increases. Further, the spool winder must be threaded up differently for the winding of each spool which is time consuming. When a large number of different colours are used in both the column and row or warp and weft direction of each pattern repeat the number of different coloured yarn packages supplying the spool winder can be even larger than those on a creel of a typical Jacquard Axminster loom. The pattern repeat on spool looms is limited by the number of spools available in the spool chain. Further, there is considerably greater yarn wastage from a spool Axminster loom than a gripper Axminster loom because, on completion of a run, waste is generated from each weaving point of each row of the pattern repeat.